


An Impossible Thing a Day

by nekare



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Director of SHIELD Peggy Carter, Gen, Peggy is a badass
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-12
Updated: 2015-04-12
Packaged: 2018-03-22 10:51:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3726013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nekare/pseuds/nekare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“I saw a ghost,” Howard says over the phone.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Impossible Thing a Day

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [aweefofsaturdays](http://aweekofsaturdays.tumblr.com/), who requested _things you said over the phone_ on a fic meme :33 Brevity is... not my selling point, oops.

Her private line rings at a quarter to midnight, startling Peggy out of her paperwork. She knows she’s not the only one still working at this time of the day - she never is at SHIELD - but she might as well be, with how quiet it is.

She can hear Howard slurring on the other side of the line as soon as she picks up the phone. “I think I’m seeing things, Peg.” 

“Oh, what a surprise, Howard, you’re drunk again.” Peggy holds the phone between her neck and shoulder and goes back to signing papers, scratching at her ankle with her stocking feet with her heels thrown haphazardly under her desk. She squints through the reading glasses she hates she needs and refuses to wear whenever anyone else is around, skimming through the pages-long legalese nonsense.

“I saw a ghost,” he goes on, and Peggy puts her pen down to rub at the bridge of her nose. 

"Did you now," she says, dry.

There is a moment of silence. “It was Barnes,” he says, so quiet she almost misses it, and after that there’s the sound of ice cubes and liquid sloshing against a glass. He sounds shaken, but then again he’s always had a taste for the dramatic.

“I think you should probably stop drinking for the night.” She leans back in her chair, suddenly aching for a hot bath and her own bed; the comfort of her husband’s warmth beside her. She hasn’t been home in two days - a team in the field is due to report at 0900 Moscow time, and this is just a lull before the inevitable next crisis.

“It was just a glimpse while I was driving but - it looked just like him. Straight out of ‘44 and giving me that cold flat stare, you remember that one? The way he got when he thought Steve wasn’t looking?”

Peggy does, in fact, remember it well. She and Barnes were never really friends, despite Steve’s best efforts, but they both knew how to share silence, and made a habit of smoking next to each other under freezing rain and with mud up to their ankles, close together but lost in their own thoughts. Some people gained a purpose in wartime, and some were irrevocably crushed by it, and they both always knew which applied to them. They understood each other, in a somewhat grim way, and a shared affection for Steve pulled them together.

She closes her eyes and picks her pen up again just to have something to do with her hands, wishing she could just hang up. “It was not Sergeant Barnes, Howard, you're talking nonsense. You know that.”

“Yes, I do know that, thank you. I’m not that blind to my own mental breakdown.”

Peggy sighs. “Then why did you call, Howard? I am not your priest, or your employer any longer.” 

“So I can’t even call an old friend to talk about the good old days of flying under artillery fire together?”

"Seeing that you only do that when you want something, no, no you can't. I'm old and busy, Howard. Why did you really call?"

She can hear him having another long drink before he answers. "This ghost - he had some tech on him that shouldn't exist."

"Well, it's probably good that it was just a ghost, then."

"You're not listening. This was an actual person, with body modifications that shouldn't exist because I created them with our Paperclip scientists - and then scrapped completely in the mid 50s when the trials started getting disturbing."

"And now it's back to haunt you in the form of the best friend of the man you've been obsessed with for decades? How convenient." If this is real, if there really is a breach of SHIELD intel, she will chase it. But Howard has been unstable for years, and drinking heavily for even longer. 

"Jesus, why did I even bother calling you. If you’re not doing anything about it, I will. I still remember how to do research without a thousand minions under me, unlike some people,” he says, and Peggy just rolls her eyes at the obvious dig.

“You do that,” she says, and hangs up. 

After a moment of staring blankly at the paperwork in front of her, she swivels around in her chair to stare out of her window into the blue darkness, her fingers beating fast against her armrest. 

Talking to Howard always leaves her rattled, with a low current of anxiety churning under her skin. No matter how many years it’s been, or how much they’ve been through together, Howard always reminds her of Steve. Maybe it’s because she can see the same kind of longing in his eyes, a similar kind of ache. She knows he doesn’t think so, but she’s come to realize that what he wants back is his magnum opus, the summit of his life’s work, instead of the determined, honest man she once taught how to fight and that looked the most beautiful with that dazed, dreamy look he wore when he was between her thighs.

She hadn’t thought of Barnes in years. It’s almost hard to picture him without Steve in the foreground, his features fading and growing hazy while Steve’s crooked nose and long eyelashes stay fresh in her memory. Once again, she wishes she still had that old photo of Steve that went from drawer to drawer along with her for so long - she has copies, of course, all junior SHIELD agents fall over themselves to get her some, but it’s not the same. That yellowed, withered original was lost when her office was bombed in ‘74, her first year as Director, and her drawer has been empty ever since. 

She stays awake for another twenty-two hours, and gets scolded by her meddling children and her even more meddlesome doctor afterwards, but no bomb goes off in St. Petersburg, and the also meddling public and her children and grandchildren and even that doctor sleep safe that night, so she waves them off the same way she has done for years - and that she intends to keep doing for years.

Three weeks later, Howard and Maria Stark are dead, of a car crash of all things, but as she stands in a graveyard watching their drunk teenage son shouting and making a fool of himself until Obadiah Stane holds him close for him to sob on his shoulder, all she can think of is of Howard’s ghost and missing forty-years-old schematics and the odd tire mark pattern next to the crash site. Maybe she _will_ look into it after all.

 

\----

 

The next year, the World Security Council retires her.

 

\---

 

Years and years later, she starts hyperventilating while Maria Hill is still pressing her down to the floor, returning fire to the ghost of James Barnes and calling for backup in her comm. Absently, through the choking bile rising up her throat and the _but how_ burning in her head, she thinks that they’ll evict her from the home. Her eldest will have _fits_. 

The flower vase next to her bed explodes in a cascade of water and broken glass, and then her thoughts change to _he never used to miss._ It’s a sloppy attempt, so poorly planned it can only be intentional, meant to intimidate instead of succeeding. If whoever sent him wanted her dead, it would’ve happened in her sleep, without a high ranking SHIELD agent nearby. No, they wanted her to recognize him.

The glimpses she gets of Barnes through gunfire and debris make her breathless. He looks just the same as the day he fell off that train - a bit bigger, perhaps, harder and colder around the edges. A red line bisects his handsome face, as if he’d been wearing a mask just before he’d come into the room. And the metal arm, of course. it’s hard to pass that by while he uses it to deflect bullets and then to grab Agent Hill by the neck and slam her against the drywall, over and over until she drops her gun and slides down the wall, breathing but only just. 

Then there’s only Barnes, standing over her with both feet caging her in, gun pointed at her forehead and his face set in a determined sort of blankness, eyes empty of recognition. He won’t shoot. She knows this, because he would have already. Even so, she wraps her frail fingers as tight as they can go around the small knife Hill slipped her after she first pushed her to the ground, and she drags it around his achilles tendon, fast and sharp and vicious, a part of her euphoric at the way he stumbles, at the blood seeping into her neat nightgown. 

She raises her knife again as he does the same with his gun, and they stare at each other for a long moment, their loud breathing the only sound in the room. There’s an emptiness in Barnes’ eyes that makes her shiver, that doesn’t fit in at all with the man from her memories - that Barnes was cold and distant by that stage of the war, but he was still _angry_ , at the world and Zola and the US Army and even Steve, sometimes, before Steve smiled big at him and Barnes melted all over. This man - this man doesn’t feel like a person at all, rather more like an extension of his weapon, just as hard and dangerous.

That’s how Fury’s pet STRIKE team find them, but Barnes barely glances up at the sound of a dozen cocked guns. He instead gives a last long look at Peggy, still bleeding all over her, before springing into action.

Afterwards, a painfully young paramedic wraps a blanket around her shoulders - never mind the warm breeze coming in through the broken window - helps her sit on her bed and checks her pupils while her own eyes slip time and time again to the pools of blood covering the floor. There’s a tooth lying on its side by the biggest one, next to one of Peggy’s soaked slippers. No bodies though, oddly enough. Barnes came and went with the maximum brutality and the minimum lethality, and both Agent Hill and the entire STRIKE team are being seen to in an improvised triage room in what used to be the home’s rec room. 

“Are you sure you’re alright, ma’am?” The young paramedic asks, biting at her lip and looking awful worried for someone spreading iodine on a tiny scrape. Peggy can only imagine what she looks like to this girl, with her stained hands and wrinkled face, and she feels so, so old in that moment, feeling the full ache of all her years on her shoulders as she thinks of Barnes’ dead eyes, the flush of youth still somehow in his face. She thinks of Howard, who she dismissed as a paranoid drunk old man. She then wonders where they went wrong.

It’s a shame about the flowers, she thinks as she’s helped out of the room and she steps over torn petals and tacky blood, sidestepping glass slivers and bullet casings. They had been ever so lovely, and they’d just been brought by the very same day, a birthday gift from Alexander Pierce himself, such a charming gesture by such a charming man. 

She means to tell SHIELD about Barnes, she really does. But by the next day she’s forgotten all about it, like it never happened at all.

**Author's Note:**

> Come cry with me about Peggy and Bucky [in my tumblr!](http://nekare.tumblr.com/)


End file.
